Ecology movement

Ecology movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The global ecology movement is based upon environmental protection, and is one of several new social movements that emerged at the end of the 1960s. As a values-driven social movement, it should be distinguished from the pre-existing science of ecology.

The ecology movement has evolved and branched out to different means of effecting change. There is the political branch with the Green parties. Organisations like Greenpeace were more radical, taking direct action against environmental destruction. Its views on people, behaviors, events centered around the political and lifestyle implications of the science of ecology and the idea of nature as a value in itself. "Ecology movement" is an umbrella term for different groups, ideologies and attitudes.

A radical wing of the ecology movement opposes and actually illegally sabotages or destroys infrastructural capital of what they deem to be "Earth rapist" activities. This includes the Anarchist Golfing Association and the Earth Liberation Front, which are sometimes accused of terrorism. Even though no physical harm has come to an animal or human being, they have inflicted large economic losses on many economies. Their acts include the fire-bombing of a Forestry Service installation in Erie, Pennsylvania. Very few in the ecology movement would accept doing bodily harm by non-legal means to achieve their goals - they have no organized presence and are rejected by almost all players in the ecology movement. Some who hold property damage and bodily harm in moral equivalence, may reject this distinction, e.g. the US FBI which has labelled the Earth Liberation Front as a "terrorist group" (although the U.S. Department of Defense does not).